Explore the vast range of titles available.

A fascinating examination of family life and social relationships at this powerful prehistoric community, which at its peak was the largest city north of Mexico Complex Mississippian polities were neither developed nor sustained in a vacuum. A broad range of small-scale social groups played a variety of roles in the emergence of regionally organized political hierarchies that governed large-scale ceremonial centers. Recent research has revealed the extent to which interactions among corporately organized clans led to the development, success, and collapse of Moundville. These insights into Moundville’s social complexity are based primarily on the study of monumental architecture and mortuary ceremonialism. Less is known about how everyday domestic practices produced and were produced by broader networks of power and inequality in the region. Wilson’s research addresses this gap in our understanding by analyzing and interpreting large-scale architectural and ceramic data sets from domestic contexts. This study has revealed that the early Mississippian Moundville community consisted of numerous spatially discrete multi-household groups, similar to ethnohistorically described kin groups from the southeastern United States. Hosting feasts, dances, and other ceremonial events were important strategies by which elite groups created social debts and legitimized their positions of authority. Non-elite groups, on the other hand, maintained considerable economic and ritual autonomy through diversified production activities, risk sharing, and household ceremonialism. Organizational changes in Moundville’s residential occupation highlight the different ways kin groups defined and redefined their corporate status and identities over the long term.

Explores the archaeology of Mississippian communities and households using new data and advances in method and theory   Published in 1995, Mississippian Communities and Households , edited by J.Daniel Rogers and Bruce D.

Much of what is known about the Indigenous city of Cahokia, located in and influential on the North American midcontinent during the eleventh through fourteenth centuries AD, derives from decades of salvage, research, and CRM excavations in the surrounding American Bottom region. We use this robust dataset to explore patterns of building conflagration that suggest these practices of burning were part of pre-Mississippian traditions that were bundled into new Cahokian landscapes during the early consolidation of the city. These bundled practices entangled sources of power that were at once political and religious, thus transforming the practices and meanings associated with terminating building use via fire. Mucho de lo que se conoce sobre la ciudad indígena de Cahokia, ubicada en el medio continente norteamericano durante los siglos XI al XIV dC, deriva de décadas de excavaciones de rescate, investigación y CRM en la región circundante de América. Utilizamos este sólido conjunto de datos para explorar patrones de conflagración de edificios, lo que sugiere que estas prácticas de quema fueron parte de las tradiciones pre-Mississippian que se incluyeron en los nuevos paisajes de Cahokian durante la consolidación temprana de la ciudad. Estas prácticas agrupadas enmarañaron fuentes de poder que eran a la vez políticas y religiosas, transformando así las prácticas y los significados asociados con la terminación del uso del edificio a través del fuego.

This paper employs concepts from Bourdieu’s theory of social fields and contemporary research on transnationalism to explore the complicated history of population movement, culture contact, and interaction that fueled the origins of Mississippian society in the greater Cahokia area and closely related socio-political developments in the Central Illinois River Valley (CIRV) of west-central Illinois. We offer a new take on Mississippian origins and the history of culture contact in the CIRV, arguing that interregional simultaneity and inter-group collaboration played an important part of the early processes of Mississippianization in the North American Midwest. By decentering Cahokia in our explanation of Mississippian origins in the greater Midwest, we argue for a long-term persistence of traditional pre-Mississippian practices in the CIRV region, beginning with the first documented engagement among Cahokians and Illinois Valley groups in the early eleventh century until the beginning of the thirteenth century AD.

ABSTRACT Objective research has become an institution, one born out of the Enlightenment, and one that continues to burden public administration scholarship (and, we suspect, much scholarship in the social sciences). As we show, objectivity is a complex, multi-dimensional concept that commands its normative status through dominant philosophies of science. We problematize objectivity, focusing on the dimension of objectivity that suggests research can and should be value-free. Many scholars have contested this notion of objectivity, especially those arguing that research claiming to be value-neutral has done real harm to marginalized groups and undermined social equity. From this basis, we invite public administration scholars to remove the yoke of objectivity for a more honest, conscientious, and forthright field where scholars incorporate greater reflexivity into and take greater responsibility for the social impact of their work.

In this paper I highlight the potential of social memory research to enhance our archaeological understanding of Mississippian social organization and identity politics. Mississippian communities commemorated and invoked the past through the creation and manipulation of landscapes, places, and things. To demonstrate the utility of this approach I examine and discuss Mississippian architectural and mortuary data from the Moundville site in west-central Alabama. On the basis of this examination I argue that social memory played an important role in the negotiation of social identities and the organization of community space at the Moundville site and the Mississippian Black Warrior Valley.

Chronology building has long served as a major focus of archaeological interest in the Central Illinois River valley (CIRV) of west-central Illinois. Previous methods have relied primarily upon relative dating techniques (e.g., ceramic seriation) as a means of sorting out temporal relationships between sites. This study represents the first investigation into the utility of Bayesian techniques (which consider radiocarbon dates in context with archaeological information) in the CIRV. We present the results of a detailed ceramic seriation of the region, data that we use as a priori information in our Bayesian models. We then offer contiguous, overlapping, and sequential models of site occupations in the Mississippian CIRV, review the output and appropriateness of each model, and consider their implications for the pace of sociopolitical change in the region.

We consider the causes and timing of maize (Zea mays) intensification in the central Illinois River valley and argue that an understanding of changes in maize production requires a consideration of changes occurring in the entire plant subsistence system. To this end, we explore trends in the collection and production of plant foods from the Late Woodland (A.D. 600-1100) to Early Mississippian periods (A.D. 1100-1200). The plant data reveal a stepwise decrease in nut collection during the Late Woodland period, and again during the transition to the Early Mississippian period. This pattern is accompanied by statistical increases in maize abundance, indicating an intensification of maize production around A.D. 1100. We consider these patterns in light of similar maize increases occurring throughout the Eastern Woodlands and evaluate several possible interpretations related to population pressure, climate change, competitive generosity, and cultural emulation, the latter which appears to have been inspired by prolonged contact between local populations and Mississippian groups in the greater Cahokia area.

The nonprofit sector has become known as a public good where organizations are created to address various kinds of social problems. As organizations carry out diverse missions, they are expected to encounter a standard set of challenges - regardless of who leads them. Despite extensive work on the intersection of race and nonprofits, the sector, itself, remains understood as a race-neutral space. This dissertation develops a novel theoretical framework, the racialized nonprofit industrial complex (RNIC), and shows how racial stratification shapes the experiences of Black-led organizations (BLOs) in two medium-sized cities that differ in their racial demography and structure.Using data from a four-year, two-city qualitative study, I ask three questions: (1) how and in what ways is the nonprofit sector, itself, racialized; (2) how does racialization influence the behavior, decision-making, and activities of BLOs in the nonprofit sector and does it vary by place; and (3) What strategies do Black-led organizations use in response to racialization?Chapter 1 discusses extraordinarily unusual racial disparities across two unlikely cities and situates BLOs as playing a central role in addressing these issues on behalf of a predominately Black client base while also facing a unique set of challenges in carrying out their mission. Chapter 2 develops a novel theory of racialization in the sector that I call the racialized nonprofit industrial complex (RNIC). I define the RNIC as a racialized social system where Black-led and white-led organizations are placed into separate categories that differentially shape how they function and operate within the sector. Chapter 3 introduces the concept of middle cities where we might expect to find an RNIC and offers a justification for the two empirical cases: Madison, Wisconsin, and Montgomery, Alabama. Chapter 4 presents data describing how a small number of BLOs are impacted by racialization in the overwhelmingly white Madison sector and how they use strategies that reflect their unique relationship to clients to successfully navigate the city’s RNIC. Chapter 5 presents data describing how a critical mass of BLOs are impacted by racialization within a white-dominated sector in a predominantly Black city and how they lean heavily on a civil rights movement ethic to challenge and navigate the city’s RNIC. Chapter 6 offers a conclusion that contrasts the cases to show how the RNIC differs by place and how this impacts the capacity of BLOs to successfully navigate the system. This contrast serves as the basis for a discussion about how we might arrive at a more equitable sector where we radically redefine our expectations about what it means to be a successful organization – expectations often rooted in whiteness. This will allow us to move beyond merely proposing best practices aimed at situational equity to, instead, recognize BLOs as legitimate actors who have agency to best meet the needs of clients with whom they share a unique connection.

This paper focuses on the issues of craft, style, and exchange as they relate to political-economic change in middle-range societies. Specifically, I offer a functional analysis ofMississippian fineware from the American Bottom. Archaeological evidence suggests that these eating and serving wares were used primarily within public ceremonies at regional political centers. In addition to other craft goods, fineware vessels were components of a structured ceremonial context in which ideas and relationships were negotiated and defined in the Mississippian world. Diachronie changes in the production, distribution, and use of these wares correspond with broader political-economic changes in the American Bottom.